


a madness made for two

by uptownskunk



Category: Original Work
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Literal Human Centipedes, Mad Scientists, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-18 14:22:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18251624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uptownskunk/pseuds/uptownskunk
Summary: Doctor Henson destroys the world to make it quiet, but finds she doesn’t enjoy being the last person left on the planet as much as she thought she would. A centipede who made its way into her hideout gives her an idea on how to fix that.





	a madness made for two

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt ‘human centipedes’. There are only a few ways that prompt can go and frankly, I only enjoy asses and mouths meeting when they’re not sewn together, thanks.

Doctor Henson spends seven days, seventeen hours and twenty two minutes in the sterile white space of her underground bunker before she finally musters up enough courage to put on her safety suit and climb the metal rungs of the ladder leading up to the surface to take a peak out.

Of course, there’s nothing to see when she looks out there.

The whole world is nothing but a flat field of black ash in every direction for as far as Henson’s eyes can see.

Not a single building stands where there once was a large city.

No people walk the grounds where there once were millions.

No birds fly overhead where there once seemed to be more pigeons than people.

There is nothing but Doctor Henson’s covered head sticking out of a hole in the ground, her eyes taking in the sight of a world that has been annihilated and her mouth slowly spreading into a smile at the fact that she is the only person left alive on the face of the Earth – just like she planned when she destroyed the world in the first place.

Henson goes back into her bunker, closing the lid tightly behind her, and relishes in the silence that will surround her for the rest of her life.

It only takes another month for that same silence to drive her insane.

People are a scourge, Henson has always thought so. They’re loud by nature, driving around in louder vehicles to take their noisy offspring off to gather in packs where they can all scream together.

It was enough of a bother – of a source of hatred – for Henson to devote her life to finding a way to shut off the noise and make the world quiet, the way a good world _should_ be, but a month in to her self-imposed exile has Henson realizing with dread that the silence that comes with loneliness is not any more preferable than the noises of day to day city life.

Loneliness makes Henson’s heartbeat sound like a pounding on the door in the vast expanse of her bunker. It makes her breathing sound like gusts of wind, her swallows sound like gunshots, her teeth chewing on meal replacement bars sound like the crunching of tires over gravel. Every sound is louder by virtue of her being the only one to make sound and the only one to hear it both.

Henson had friends in the world, before. Not ones she wanted to talk to every day or even all that often, but there were occasions where the sound of another person’s breathing didn’t bother her, where she actually found comfort in it.

Maybe, Henson realizes, she had made a mistake. Maybe she should have found someone to bring into the bunker with her before she got rid of everyone else. She could have kept them muzzled if their noises got  to be  too much for her and only let them speak  when  she wanted them to be heard.  Maybe she was too rash in just jumping into her plan without thinking of this first.

It’s too late to go back and change anything now, though, but – 

A small movement out of the corner of Henson’s eye catches her attention. 

She turns to look and sees it  immediately : a small dark body with many spindly legs.  The thing stands out easily aga inst the white wall of her bunker as the legs all move in tandem to keep the centipede  moving along, nowhere for it to hide. 

It seems Henson isn’t as alone in the world as she once believed, and it’s  _this_ thought that has another plan growing in the horror of her brilliant mind.

If she had killed all the people in the world, so be it. Why should she let that stop her? If it’s too late to find a person from the surface to be her companion, then Doctor Henson will just have to make a person here in her bunker. She has the mind to do so, she has the lab, and – as she watches the centipede crawl along her wall – she has the perfect starting point.

Henson had destroyed the world, after all, when no one else had ever come close. 

Ho w hard could it be to turn an insect into a man?


End file.
